A public land mobile network (PLMN) is a regulatory term in telecommunications, referring to a network that is operated for the purpose of providing land mobile communication services to the public. A PLMN is identified by the Mobile Country Code (MCC) and the Mobile Network Code (MNC). Access to PLMN services is achieved by means of an air interface involving radio communications between mobile phones, or other wireless enabled user equipment (UE), and land based radio transmitters or radio base stations (BS).
A given PLMN operates in accordance with a certain radio access technology (RAT), such as, for example, global system for mobile communications (GSM), wideband code-division multiple access (WCDMA) or long term evolution (LTE).
The GSM air interface is specified, for example, in “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group GSM/EDGE Radio Access Network; Radio transmission and reception (Release 10),” 3GPP specification TS 45.005, version 10.1.0, May, 2011, which is incorporated herein by reference. Section 2 of this standard specifies uplink and downlink frequency bands that may be allocated to GSM networks.
The WCDMA air interface is specified, for example, in “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network; User Equipment (UE) radio transmission and reception (FDD) (Release 10),” 3GPP specification TS 25.101, version 10.2.0, June, 2011, which is incorporated herein by reference. Section 5 of this standard specifies uplink and downlink frequency bands that may be allocated to WCDMA networks.
The LTE air interface is specified, for example, in “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network; Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); User Equipment (UE) radio transmission and reception (Release 10),” 3GPP specification TS 36.101, version 10.3.0, June, 2011, which is incorporated herein by reference. Section 5 of this standard specifies uplink and downlink frequency bands that may be allocated to LTE networks.
The description above is presented as a general overview of related art in this field and should not be construed as an admission that any of the information it contains constitutes prior art against the present patent application.